The Big Al Experiment: UPDATE
A little over a week ago, I broke the Prime Directive of writers—NOT to have relatives read and critique your writing—by having my father, "Big Al" read my latest PI novel. In case you missed the first installment of this story, you can read it here.
Well, I promised you an update, and here it is.
Al, in complete shock after reading my latest novel.
For dramatic purposes, it would be more interesting to be able to report that Al had ripped the book to shreds or fawned over every word, but the truth is he did an excellent job as a reader. Not only did he catch missing articles and verbs (victims of the latest round of edits), he also was very clear about places in the book where he got confused.
I always believed my father would have been a great detective. In 25 years as a school principal, he became very good at piecing together "crimes" perpetrated by students; he is a master at seeing the result and reasoning back to the causes. I don't have this ability. I can weave ideas together, spin a yarn, but I can't figure these things out logically to save my life.
Al especially helped me regarding beefing up certain suspects' motives. He didn't buy into a couple of the suspects' reasons for potentially committing the crime, and in saying so, he will be helping me to fix it.
Overall, I'm very pleased with the Big Al Experiment. Contrary to what you might think, reading and going over the novel somehow brought us closer. I will definitely employ Al again as a reader. Even though, as a lefty, he can't write for shit.
Looks like I'm going to be crossing the street a lot to decipher his comments.